Roses are Red...and Owls are Brown

"As you walk down the fairway of life you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round."
Ben Hogan

The Diva's challenge this week was to incorporate a stencil as the string of your Zentangle. As soon as I saw that I knew right away what stencil I would use. I recently bought a stencil of a rose at A.C Moore, which was waiting patiently for me in my stencil binder.

First I debated which method I would use to color the rose - Ranger ink pads, alcohol markers, or watercolor markers - since this would impact what type of paper I would use.  Deciding on alcohol markers, I traced the outline of the rose, and then added the leaves freehand since there were none included with the stencil. I then used Prismacolor markers for the flower because I liked the combination of reds I had, and Copics for the leaves. A sketchbook made by Copic which has a special kind of marker paper meant for alcohol markers was the obvious choice for paper, as it allows the markers to blend nicely. Unfortunately I found that the Prismacolor markers caused a drop of bleeding at the edges which I had not expected, while the Copic markers did not. Luckily the bleeding is not too visible unless you are inspecting it carefully. I meant to take a picture of the rose before I began tangling, but I forgot until after I had tangled the first section, so here it is.

I continued tangling each section of the rose and leaves with different tangles. It wasn't easy figuring out what to do with the very small pieces! After it was complete, I went back in with the markers and added just a little more shading to what was already there from the original blending of the markers. The final result....

I love the way it turned out! I've worked with stencils before (see this recent blog post), and always find it a fun method for something a little different. Here is a picture of a stenciled owl I did a while ago. The owl was a stencil and I added the branch. For this one I used Derwent Inktense pencils.

Check back here again to see more tangled stencils soon....I have one just itching to be tangled.